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The Long Search: 12 -- Alternative Life Styles in California

by: British Broadcasting Corporation. Television Service

Publication date: 1978

Topics: Religion, Spiritual life, Religion, Spiritual life

Publisher: New York : Time-Life Multimedia

Language: English

Rights: The Long Search: 12 -- Alternative Life Styles in California Search Educational Film Journals at Media History Project for references to this film

Also issued as videocassette

Producer, Peter Montagnon; narrator, Ronald Eyre

Visits the San Francisco Bay area to examine the new religious concerns of people who are looking East to Hinduism and Taoism for inspiration. Explores the search for a saner and more wholesome life in which ecology is held sacred and the accent is on good health

Addeddate: 2015-07-10 23:45:58

Boxid: IA1130104

Identifier: thelongsearch12alternativelifestylesincaliforniareel1

Lccn: 78700482

Ocr: To. Put to you. Put. The culture we live in is planning to fix pushy and in love with its machines. Up through the nukes and crannies of this culture that creeps something that's been called the counter culture. This is community supported public radio K.Q.E.D. F.M. in San Francisco. With you. It is only through a change of consciousness if it were you be transformed. As we bring mind boggling psyche and spirit into harmony and unity. So all single who would choose. This is all responsibility. As we create and explore. New dimensions of the you. Put. And this evening on new dimensions were exploring the father reaches of human consciousness with our special guest Theodore Roosevelt Ted in your books you have noted the variety of activities that are going on in this entire field. Do you see these things as merely a passing fad or do they have deeper meaning what I see around me and most prominently in this area we were sort of super saturated with such experiments is a great religious appetite reaching out in many directions that are not traditionally religious character a great deal of this goes under the heading of therapy. Parasite college each consciousness research and so on besides formal religious commitments but what they're trying to do is to salvage. Something out of the spiritual traditions of the past and to bring it into their lives as a as a living and daily reality and so they search the group in ways that are sometimes awkward unbecoming a lot of false starts a lot of Follies along the way. And very often that's what people thought this is what they fasten on for purposes of criticism. Lead the force start and many follies. And you know it's legitimate enough to criticise things that are superficial wounds for being for being that but I think it's it's just this week Mr overlook or to treat with contempt. The need that's involved in this it's one thing to to mock the many inadequate ways people seek to meet that need it's quite another thing to mock the need. They're all rows act is a professor of history and a writer. Modern industrial man he sees as aggressive exploitive compulsively masculine picket against the planets in a battle he essentially cannot when he challenges I met. He had a list culture to look at a few alternatives. Some new experiments. Though he knows that they tend to be frail and constantly at risk. Rather like those plucky little birds that pick out the most was the food from a crocodile. One of our conversations got down to that old chestnut is God dead and did science killed him. Well you know I think the only way you get rid of one God is by replacing that God with another God and we are far from being an irreligious aside it's simply that are the new just faces going on into another area of life. I suspect that we address. Progress. GROSS affluence. Industrial power in our society with all the commotion your enthusiasm that once characterized to the just face. It it's interesting that a lot of fun. Science today around the fringes of the scientific community has begun to doubt whether our society is an adequate description of reality whether it's an adequate God. This is the two mile long linear accelerator at Stanford University. I suppose you could call it one of the holy places of modern science. Things called particles hurtle the Langs to this great cathedral nave that's near the speed of light coming to to listen and from the DAYBREAK scientists the observer's search for clues to the nature of reality. I tricks along the roof of the accelerator with Dr Fritjof Capra He's a physicist in his writings he tries to relate some of the insights of modern physics to what are called in the religious traditions. Mystical insights. In our discussions I had enormous difficulty keeping up but from what I could gather there's a new physics under the old physics and the new physics using the latest machinery is undermining one by one the assumptions on which the old physics science itself and all this machinery have been built it sounds very like sitting on the branch of a tree and sawing it off. Just help me. I'm going to think of what is happening in physics. This century as being a refinement. Movements that were already happening say last century or is it some sort of new stuff. Suddenly. A revolutionary new development that happened in the center is a development that's not shocking to time the people had to unlearn things definitely very painfully. At the previous state or physics recall that Newton's physics it's called classical physics on you Tony and physics can you sir are the main feature of classical physics is all you could say that the classical physics was essentially a mechanistic view where the world will seen consisting of different objects. Working together in some kind of a huge machine. Everything is a sort of machine right here but this machine furthermore can be observed and understood. Objectively that is without ever mentioning the human observer is totally separated from the human observer. It is made of. Several basic building blocks. Which in turn consists of some fundamental material substance this was basically the view. That if you weren't. Making looking taking a more macroscopic things on and on and on you would go on seeing some smaller version of what you're seeing right and. Prevalent recipe for understanding things to take them apart if you don't understand something take it apart and study its components and if you don't understand take them. Apart and study their company and so I went for each of Capra moved on to the new physics I was reminded of some well known words by so James Dean's astronomer who died in one nine hundred forty six. Universe he said begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. And the Newtonian world view. Very extreme an important influence on all the other sciences in general scientists all sciences the natural sciences as well the second man it is modeled themselves after classical Newtonian physics and you see God simply was not available for use underneath the microscope there for what did I make it so I realized God was outside but provided the fundamental laws according to which everything moved as you can understand how in a society which works this way although Newton may have had god providing the material people who are using American scripts themselves observers would make got totally irrelevant right. Could you straight in what way do you think it's possible that a change may happen in our thinking and our society because of a revolution in physics this century. Well if. This is indeed but I think it's going to going to happen I think that the impact of the new physics will be strictly important for the fields of science and scientists to see the new physics the world view of twentieth century physics is not mechanistic but rather can be called an organic view the holistic or an ecological view the world is no longer seen as being made of the multitude of objects how does ecological fit I understand holistic I keep hearing the word identical logical but not necessarily put together well we don't see the world any longer as being made of separate isolated objects the world. The universe of the modern physicist is an ongoing and ultimately indivisible process this process shows patterns. That atoms. Particles but the patterns cannot be understood as isolated physical entities the only way to understand them is through the interconnections to the hole so the universe is fundamentally interrelated and every part of it. Can only be understood rule it's interlaced through its relation and connection to the whole this is fine to seek a logical because the way how everything hangs together. Determines the property. What free just seems to be talking about is a change in the way you experience the world. The difference is as radical as saying on the one hand here are separate people in separate cars going over a single bridge into a fragmented city and I separate myself can stand apart and observe them and on the other hand you the leaves the cars the shared ideas and of a shared fears of mankind are part of one indivisible process. Separateness and indivisibility That's the paradox I carried with me for the rest of this journey. Perhaps you too which ordered school that once the earth was considered to be the center of the universe and then came Galileo who demonstrated that the earth moves around the sun since then the cosmos just seem to expand and we've all become more and more microscopic but there's a counter or very near the same. If it's here that says that if I see the sun rise there and sat there and the stars move as I see the move I am the center of my universe and you are the center of yours and it's in the interests of nobody except those who would fill us with fear just Werner south somewhere on the perimeter. This view doesn't exclude God for those who worship God nor does it include God for they were to attempt with safeguards to stop us getting about ourselves it's a perfectly modest statement about where each one of us stands. One of the posters I looked at early on the journey. Said biofeedback the yoga of the West. Well I'm not sure about that but it's certainly a way of learning about yourself. Ken is plenty a trained as a medical doctor he explores Oriental traditions he meditates he works with biofeedback machinery. Here I've had pads to register tension in the Tour muscles I could have had a headband to monitor my brain waves using what are they are there or for the same thing seen from one point of view. Biofeedback happens to us all the time without machinery. Usually when we blush we know we have blushing but are there other reactions less obvious. Daddy a sins in the body waves skin and muscle tension all of them tell a story. The machinery. Allows us to observe in ourselves what would otherwise be hidden it isn't a mid-season it doesn't in itself change your situation. It reflects your situation and from that by paying attention you can perhaps help yourself if you have migraine headache which is an abnormal distribution of blood flow you could learn how to alter the blood flow to other parts of your body and alleviate the margarita headache so. What sort of meditation if you don't know how do you move from place to place I think over the last seven years say move from began doing a basic. Soften meditation for about two or three years and after that became increasingly interested in Tibet and meditation did and that's a system that I pretty much have a tear to to this point in time. Rule and find it to be very compatible with the use of electronic instrumentation to achieve many of the same instead of been talked about for thousands of years in meditation in a relatively short time by making the process more precise with the use of instruments this is sort of short cuts is that it can be thought of a shortcut I think physically we can duplicate to replicate the physical dimensions of a meditative practice more efficiently or more rapidly by the use of our instrumentation but that's not all that meditation is and what more is meditation. And the initial stages of every meditative practice if you look at it involves a a quieting a stilling of the body. Purely physical relaxation. What begins to occur at that point is that the person becomes more aware of their own mental kind of the mind works the dynamics that go on internally the passions the fears. And at that point to me the real meditation begins which is how do you deal with that much energy is tied up for wasted by excess of activity which has no purpose and that part of meditation the instruments I don't think are any more depth to deal with. Than any other time and that's when the purely psychological mental dimension meditation really requires. Teachings beyond that which the instrument can give you. Teaching. Yes. Teachers teaching teacher. Perhaps thank brats and certain states meditation you do. So in a sense we're talking about a few faces and we'll problems you're going to talk about the whole of your say waking day with one of the old one if in fact this is a for me an idea should be sent into an imaginative stage which does not mean our knowledge statements increasingly I listen to it in fact one of the things you just asked about a teacher one of the things I did not realize was pointed out by a cardiologist from India was at a conference. Made a very simple observation said the word guru teacher as used in our culture. Is a misconception that the word grew in fact in India means teacher but it's a temporary ascription to any other person who reminds you of a higher aspect of yourself but that implies that anyone could be here for you could be my guru right now you could perhaps describe that to me right now. And what it does is it allows you to look at your life as a series of living lessons every person every event these instruments as potential teachers any time that they remind you of some aspect of yourself which is higher than you would ordinarily function that you're not saying the supervisor was in his own story I read about a monk who were given away everything except spending though and he walked over a little street and he dropped his bag of the rock and it broke and he said that's my last group I think that's marvelous. So they must have got broken broken both can be as much a teacher it's a kind of door through which the difference comes in at the gate three week comes in which excellence because starting the would go to people who are determined to be under the light and doesn't Can some sort of marketplace fake and also under the under really lean and then you call I'm sure I'm not suggesting that doesn't exist. Positive. On this trip between. The home of orange juice and the linear accelerator and. Her described as a state of confusing. Transcend it isn't a place. For some. This confusion external control. This control is best found in an Eastern religion. In any community. The seats stand out and. Started five hundred years ago in India. It an attempt to build a bridge between Muslim absoluteness and he. Turned out the bridge became a religion in its own right. Groups of young Americans are drawn by seek discipline under the seat message that there is one God who transcends all barriers that a man should work in the world and then he's keep and that he should share what he has with others. Incidentally the word seat springs from a root meaning learn a disciple the Sikh most from is Satsang talk sing Born a Jewish boy in New York a veteran of the peace movement and the movement for civil rights. He lives in this corner house with his wife and children and about fifteen like minded companions. During that night that's formed in May. But nothing further for me. In my search site up question. Going up and in drug induced experiences but the question is what is good quality ones life on a day to day existence from day to day moment to moment. So I decided ever I had at that time by the way ripped all the fruits of the standard Western physical desires in terms of drugs or I might work. Nice ranch in Sonoma I could satisfy any physical desire one could possibly conceive of living on the nice fringes of the psychedelic rock and roll world. Point I said I need to find a disciplined spiritual discipline and teacher. That Sam talks guide is a badge on spiritual leader of the Sikh community is in the western world. The day starts at four thirty in the morning with two and a half hours of yoga exercises. Chanting meditation and worship. After that they go to work. This particular group runs a house painting firm and some of the members also go out and teach meditation and yoga. There was. Most of the people in this room were raised as Christians or Jews. I remember asking field or a Jack why he thought that so many Westerners were two new East that's a fascinating question I've raised it with almost every one I've come across. Why not your own here own traditions. Why go whoring after all these alien god is mostly has something to do with the fact that while the Christian traditions as various as any religious tradition. What most people know what that is very much a matter of church on Sundays and Sunday school and catechism. Doctrine and belief. There seems to be very little experience there except the sort of experience that's a fervor of believing. But what's significant about the the imported religion especially the Oriental machines is that they all have something to do with experiencing. Religion more than talking about it. And I'm not sure he will find that only in the Eastern bloc but that is what people find in the eastern religions but to let it come our way. That's what they're primarily interested. You can really work on somebody's head by working on their feet. It's alright contrived you can massage their feet on the foot acts like a map of the body and it corresponds to. The body function and by giving witness a foot massage for the things that we teach in our classes you can in fact. You can massage the internal organs of the body so they can begin to regenerate itself and this is because of presumably hold this tree of an animal developing by balancing itself entirely on these things are kind of the plug into the earth like a Power Point. All right the earth is the mother on that Saturday earth as it is that which we derive the energy from. Western pavements hard on the feet. Industrial Society is hard on old people they don't boost the economy and any wisdom they might have accumulated isn't much value. These feet belong to a member of a group called sage that mostly older people. Sage is the. Brainchild of ducked again she's a psychologist she started work on growth in children. Know she's interested in growth in the aged. They meet discuss dreams try various meditation break down some barriers. Argue they don't as far as I know. Discuss physics but starting from separateness they do seem to be trying to make some new connections. It's possible that somebody who watches this class could tell Well it's just a lot of people meeting or it's just a socially just a few foot exercise could you put it in a context different from that because I imagine. With just a total change in the culture. That what we're doing. At the culture has done to make unwanted. Stereotypes isolated cut off from each other and on able to grow. So what we were doing. And to culture. So you must find them in a way. Well first of all what attracts them to him because after all it is painful to come into a situation where you've been using one way or not at all suddenly gets twisted it's quite painful. They must want to think it's the hope I think it's a hub of new possibilities. Something hasn't happened they haven't haven't they could. Talk about dying. To subject it's not too far away. Can you give us one little clue to some approach you might make to somebody who is in Malta. I don't think it I think it's a process I don't think it would be in the form of some advice that might be in the form for meditation. Interesting that people who experience themselves and have begin to realize that the universe is a safe place and to have some assurance that it's OK that this is part of life this is what's happening this is not the something else should be happening when people get to that place. Somehow the Terrapins to to dissipate a little bit early because our culture is put in terror we shouldn't die that's what the medical profession says to us until we're certain and we shouldn't die we've got that beat into us so hard that we we fight the whole process to me to have to fight our lives. This is a great is part of living dying of course every time you make a major change you go through a little form of Dion. You know how scary it is to suddenly say it to get a divorce or or change your job or decide that you're not the person that you used to be you seem to be saying that if the words make any sense health is a spiritual director could you possibly make that clear the prism of a month I think there is no such thing as health without some spiritual development because we're not disconnected from the actual reality of the natural universe and whatever losses or not or what our culture tells us we cannot disconnect ourselves that's what we're part of whether you call it God or not that is something that we can't sum up in science it is something we can never perfectly understand we simply have to accept it so the greater our development the more our except answers part of the universe. I've been rooting around in the dictionary and I've discovered that the word healthy under the word holy can be traced back to one source a single word. Very like home. W H O L E. Then came the split on the idea of the holy moved into God's territory and the idea of the healthy it was pretty much confined to not feeling poorly and there we stand divided. If I were to risk putting in one sentence what many of the people I'm eating here. Share with each other. I'd say it's a disaster. Knowledge that split and he lit so that one small what is healthy. Come home and what is holy can be home and what is healthy. And yet and yet I fly to America. Place Drive a car live in a city I'm using gadgetry to make a film to be seen by people I can see all these fragments of a twentieth century life. And world about the limping celebration. I'm glad that about this time I met straight to meet him and professor of philosophy in San Francisco State University. I suppose you could say that in a moment of desperation he became my guru. I am fragmented my world will be fragmented and I cannot heal the world until I he'll become a hole in myself in some way but here's the problem in order to become whole in myself I've got to be able to see all the fragmentation in myself I've got to be I can't be fooled and we ten what we do is I think as we tend to accept a temporary wholeness or local wholeness I bring together a few elements in myself and I feel that's wonderful that's never been done before myself and I call that Holmes but it's such a tiny piece of the whole thing and but I get so in love with that so attracted to that and I still start a whole new community on the basis of that but the real fragmentation of man is much faster than just a few local syntheses going to cure this is our problem is we settle for too little this is the problem of California is that it's not that what they wish. Is wrong I wouldn't. Presume to judge that and I don't think they're naive in the sense of but they're reaching for their not near seekers they're real seekers I think but the problem is we settle we tend to settle for a little of improvement a little homeless and that's what keeps people going in the illusions around the around for centuries. I take what Jacob Needleman says about California to heart because it applies to me. But how do you stop settling for too little how do you come to understand that the little self which drives a car lives in a house. Competes with his neighbour is not disconnected from the whole of the cosmos and the whole of time with my head I can play with the idea with my experience day by day I failed to live it out. Is such a desirable thing stopping me getting it. At this point of a rose act told me about a series of experiments around and about San Francisco very simple very modest various moves by of vanguard of people to reclaim a human quality they feel they have lost. Demystification maybe a cult word at the moment but it describes a real need and a real possibility. I think. Mystifying. The profession. And the reduction of. Engineering. It's the residents taking the mystery from all the places. Where it doesn't belong and trying to find out where it does. In a phrase I heard in the Brian patch co-operative auto shop. Cars stand at the neuro says point of industrial society. They give you the freedom to overtake your neighbor and to escape the city but get close they remind you that you are powerless. Brian patch is a cooperative gather arch where your helps to mend your own car. In the car you've mended yourself you can drive to the Brian patch co-operative store and collect your groceries. Members decide what they expect to find on the show and membership means not just buying handing over money but turning up yourself to help with the work. And if that means piercing the mysteries of wholesale and retail. Every member is in the store at least four hours every month or so and that means you keep back edition you learn about how the story runs the targets are going to take part in a day to day you'll be really involved in the union go. To do this it is hard to get home and he's run think. When you leave the shop with your groceries you work the kill yourself. Alongside the car under the store that a move to reclaim your own patch of land and learn to live off each. Here in a quite well off neighborhood near San Francisco. John and Patsy Jeevan for instance give lessons in keeping a goat The nice thing about a goat is that it is a small animal you can keep it in the backyard. They don't give an outrageous amount of milk. Maybe you're going to have to do so that it's not on handle by a family where cows. The whole fact is full of milk so what you have. To think years and sweet. If you don't close it off up here when you squeeze it just goes back I. Would like to try. When you think it would mind can write but the thank. Her for really I mean how how do you actually comes out but never the not surprised with how yes but the bone or not to go in I say. Oh the book. Around with. It takes a while to get to this is been pretty good. You feel it but not for the you know. Actually worry about animals in the saloon. It's amazing to me that two generations ago my grandfather would do what I'm trying to do as a natural part of his day's work. And here are my fingers and thumbs. Having a piece of encountering set up with a nanny goat which leaves me poised between embattled clowning under sort of remorse that something so simple for my grandfather should be so difficult to for me. What most of us mean by modern life and city life is utter dependence for transport light heat food on the services and eventually on the whims of other people. Here in one of the poorer quarters of San Francisco. Though that's a competitive term there's an experiment in urban self-sufficiency. The. Garden which is not very large is planned to supply food to sort of families throughout the year the house demonstrates what can be done with solar heating and with the recycling of human waste. Waste. We have. How many of you would really care to say for. Now very many and so over the years. Flushing it down every time we. Are now here. And at the end of two years you can remove. You can see what's happening here as an attempt to put the clock back or as a tryout for the life raft we may all need if the cities and the drains collapse. Orders a piece of milder suburban isolationism or what seems likely or you could see it as the work of a group of men and women trying to restore some give and take in their dealings with celebrating their dependency. Taking responsibility once you get a glimpse of things this way. Questions like What does a vegetable Oh to a mountain or what does a man to have aged to be absurd it is if you happen to be attacking a deep crimson carrot or pulling a laboratory train did seem silly anymore. We came to California and wondering what the gods of the twenty first century would be like and whether perhaps they'd arrived already and by some process hard to trace. We found ourselves looking at self help and small maneuvers. Perhaps in a society like ours that so far gone in fragmentation the way to help. Must start with something simple. The god monuments are all around us the prevailing religion is the religion of science you have only to look up from your digging to see it. In popular belief that the scientist is pictured as probing the universe sifting the evidence searching. He's actually thought of as the one with the arms as a generation which has rejected the priesthood of priests may catch itself out accepting the priesthood of science the toll to of technology. One of my last meetings in California was with Jeffrey Toobin. Chairman of the physics department of the University of California at Berkeley in the religion of science if you stomach the phrase he'd be a high priest and one of the grandest. As your search which. Seems to be one in which things that you thought of as underpinning and so they didn't wear rocked that you. Know it certainly doesn't the Marlins me I find as to the excitement. Whenever I to to. To find that. Concept which I had accepted through my whole life are in fact. Not reliable. We will change the thing which is them are allies in his the thought that I'm not going to live long enough to to see the. The next step in the in the whole business that that is troublesome. Curious. Question the matching of human life time with the evolution of ideas. Any given human being of course is only going to see some small fraction of this whole story and you just have to hope that you're lucky enough that within your fraction something big and exciting will happen. Talking to Jeffrey too was an extraordinary experience with a whole culture I would say that to which I belong. Tending to believe that the scientist equals at the man with the answer here I was in a room with a man who spoke of the shortness of life and the approximate nature of all scientific achievement. I'd asked him if he'd any idea what the next step in physics might be. I think. That this notion of approximation. May. Be the key. Well if I was if I were going to guess at a path which will. Take us out of our present. Set of paradoxes I would guess that it is the explicit realization of the importance of approximation that that may do it. Scientists. Like to believe that they're dealing with absolute truth they know they're not. The strange contradiction in their behavior they know they're not dealing with absolute truths but nevertheless the way in which they actually approach. Concrete questions is usually to assume that they start somehow with absolute truth. And then they work away from that. If we can find a motive operation in which we recognize that there is no absolute truth. That any starting point is necessarily flawed. And that comes very much to a question of language you see because as soon as you. Try to describe what it is you're doing. You are implicitly associating absolute truth with the meaning of the words that that you choose. That's why I say again that it comes back to a matter of language I think the this question of learning how to do science with the acceptance of approximation as an inevitable basic limitation is very closely connected with the need for finding in a new language. Check one thing when you're said there is no absolute truth it was in the context of saying there is no absolute truth which you can grip. Saying absolute truth. Limiting it. That's right that is to say I'm saying that within the context of. The language which we have now. Which is inevitably based on this notion of objectivity. If if we get a totally new language then the notion of truth would have a totally new meaning and then. And then restart again. So I think I get it if we find a new language. What we'll have is a new approximation to the truth. But then perhaps in time what is started as a new approximation will harden up and be worshiped as the whole of the truth The began so that four hundred years time there will be a need for a reincarnation of Isaac Newton thought of Jeffrey Toobin who will tell us again that our human truth is only approximate. And then I returned to again and again that sticky moments was Jacob Needleman we have a favorite poem in common. Matthew Arnold Dover Beach with nine hundred years ago. One stands or compares the ebb of the sea with the end of religion I asked Jacob Needleman his view of the state of the tide is this see a face withdrawn from never easy to on the turn his arm sir had a positive and a negative. The positive side is that it's a rejection of old cliches of rejection of frozen dog knows a rejection of things which have not the longer serve the kind of a vital interest in movement in the people so you do have the positive side is the search the negative side is the finding my in my opinion at the moment I would have to see it that way at the moment it's the searching that's so exciting about California and the money if the thing that makes it look most suspicious to people is how people go from one thing to another. This looks very has as I said this negative side but behind it is this positive thing which is I want something that works that really means something and this searching is to me than to the life of this whole thing when they begin to find and build their own tailormade religions and so forth then it is it can be rather shallow and not very hopeful. We'd call this it is a long section of the big so in a way where we had assuming that the search is it probably what would you say about that is. Always going to be on and we're not going to come to conclusion the deficit interruption may be that we're not assuming that we are going to find anything in particular I think it's quite right one of the when your thing when man is most alive is when he is in question when the security is taken away from him and then something is called into being a kind of intelligence and mind and soul if you like which is another level of consciousness another level of experience so that's sense religion is religion is in essence search it must always be search and this idea of serious lies behind Christian view of humility and many of the traditions have it so I think you've died of this very well it is a long search in the pub the big the problem is to make it deeper not just longer but. When you find a match when that when the young person or these seekers of any sort find a real spiritual guide he won't be a real God unless he deepens their search field and stead of giving him answers and solutions to the problems. I know. This.